A Step Closer to The Last Bridge

 Another big day: just sent in the final (probably) revisions to my next book, a novel called The Last Bridge. Also got the green light to share with you the cover.

Here's some bumph about it--quite a bit different than the last non-fiction books, although there's quite a bit of concrete in it!

"Collapsing bridges, Mafia money-men, one strong woman and graft: The Last Bridge tells of people caught up in corruption despite their good intentions.

"Set against the major construction industry scandals of the 2010s in Quebec, The Last Bridge tells the stories of three people caught up in them: Frannie Murray, a structural engineer; her ex-husband Daniel Marcoux who is also an engineer; and Stefano Gentile, a Mafia moneyman. None of them wanted to make the world a worse place, but each got sucked into corruption almost imperceptibly."

The Last Bridge Is on Its Way to Publication!

 Update on The Last Bridge, my next book. Just sent off the final substantive edit of the novel to Susan Fitzgerald, the Dundurn editor who has made some excellent suggestions for changes. Next up: the copy-reading stage, with publication due next spring.

To my pleasant surprise I find there'a lot in the book that is directly related to my recent non-fiction work. Specifically, concrete--done badly or well--plays an important role. Shades of my Concrete: From Ancient Origins to a Problematic Future (University of Regina Press, 2020)!

But, never fear, this one is all story!

Before We Forget Is Officially Launched

It was standing room only at the official launch party, Librarie Paragraphe.  Great fun to see all the friends--and even some people I didn't know!  The following week I was off to the West Coast for some more presentations, and now that  I'm back in Montreal I'm looking forward to being  be part of the line-up at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival.  

 

 

The Last Bridge to Be Published by Dundurn in May 2027!

 Well, I said it would a few days, and even if it was more than that, it was worth waiting for.  The Last Bridge, my 20th book and seventh novel ,will be published in May 2027 by Dundurn.  Yay!

Watch This Space! Good News about Mary's Latest Fiction

 

Mary's signing for the publication of her 20th book, a novel The Last Bridge.  Details in a few days!

Dundurn to Publish Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us through the Next 75 Years

 

Coming in March 2026:

 

Safeguarding collective wisdom is a powerful tool for civilization to overcome the major upheavals ahead.

Climate change, civil unrest, wars: How will we make it through the tough times that loom ahead of us? By remembering, Mary Soderstrom argues.

Our time is the first in history that catastrophe has threatened societies, but, using examples from China, the Roman Empire, and North American Indigenous cultures, Soderstrom shows how memory can lead the way toward the future. Before We Forget examines how memory works in people, and then details how we store our collective memories in libraries and archives, as well as in the vastness of the electronic universe.

In part an entertaining history of knowledge and where we keep it, Before We Forget allays fears and encourages people to develop strategies for safeguarding collective and individual wisdom, which we will need to meet the challenges ahead.

The First Copies Arrive, Great Endorsements Too

 Wednesday the first copies of my new book, Against the Seas: Saving Civilizations from Rising Waters arrived.  Most appropriate as storms batter California, destroying beaches and bridges and badly-sited houses.  We are going to have to learn to live with rising waters.  Doing so will require some changes in the way we build our cities and live our lives. 

While the book won't be available in stores until the end of February, it's already received some great endorsements.

T.C. Boyle, author of A Friend of the Earth and the forthcoming Blue Skies: "Against the Seas is a clear-eyed and fascinating look at the central threat our species faces: sea-level rise as a result of climate change."
 

Maude Barlow,  activist and author of Still Hopeful: Lessons from a Lifetime of Activism. "An incredible read.… While unflinching in her analysis, Soderstrom nevertheless gifts us with a message of hope and resilience." 

Wayne Grady, author of The Quiet Limit of the World: "Soderstrom sets out in clear, detailed terms what has been done (not enough) and, more importantly, what can be done (surprisingly, a lot) to slow down the juggernaut of global warming.

Some Great Reviews for Concrete: From Ancient Origins to a Problematic Future

The reviews for Concrete have been coming in, and they're really exciting.

From Resilience: "Soderstrom wants us to understand the vast scope of the challenge we face in transforming our concrete civilization into something sustainable."

From The Tyee:  "Concrete ... offer a very readable, thoughtful and well-documented account of a material that helps and hurts us in almost equal measure.

Rabble says:  "It is when she shifts from the social and ecological problems to the artistic and social wonders of concrete that her prose shines and her reasons for writing the book are clear. Her more figurative approach to concrete as the, well, concrete embodiment of our dreams and ambitions is passionate and for that reason infectious. Descriptions of Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67, Oscar Niemeyer's buildings in Brasilia, the Grande Arche in Paris and the Golden Dream Bay in Qinhuangdao: these are where Concrete finds its way."

Read an excerpt in Canadian Architect.  They also suggested it as a perfect gift for that materials-geek on your gift list!

Here's a short video about the book, too

 

Now Available: Why Some Places That Are Alike Aren't Alike

In the summer of 1968, in the middle of the American involvement in the Vietnam wars, Mary Soderstrom and her husband  loaded up their VW Beetle and immigrated to Canada so he could accept a job in Montreal.  The contrast between their new home and their old led to a long-running reflection on what makes the countries different, and by extension, what makes States and states who have so much in common that they seem like unidentical twins, continue as separate entities.

            In  Frenemies Nations: Love and Hate between Neighbo(u)ring States,  Soderstrom uses decades of study, travel and observation to investigate this conundrum, beginning with the reasons why there were two Vietnams way back then.  The other examples she found are many and varied:

            * New Hampshire--home of "Live free or die" populism--and Vermont--home of Bernie Sanders and his peculiarly American brand of socialism;

            *Two Canadian provinces, red neck Alberta and Saskatchewan, the cradle of Canada's universal health care system;

            *Tunisia and Algeria;

            * Burundi and Rwanda.      

            *Haiti and the Dominican Republic

            *The ancient island realms of Scotland and Ireland 

            *The Indian states of  Kerala and  Tamil Nadu 

            * Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking South America 

            The book ends with consideration of the United States of America and Canada as well as speculation about what brings change to  societies. These include geographic variations, no matter how minimal; colonial history that sometimes depends on the toss of dice half a world away; exposure to the wider world; the traditional place awarded women; the shelter that a language can give; how the people are educated; and migration, both voluntary and involuntary.  All of these have implications for the way polities develop.  They also carry lessons for those who'd like to change the future.

Road through Time Now Available

Great reviews for Road through Time in Quill and Quire, Publishers' Weekly, The Library Journal and, most recently, The Montreal Review of Books. 

Katia Grubisic starts her review interview in the MRB: "Mary Soderstrom might just be my new favourite writer. She’s been writing for years, and we’ve been reading her for years, but meeting her reveals an energy that is contagious, and a humility that should be. Soderstrom in person is as unassuming, open, and delightful as she is erudite and elegant on the page.... "

The book is available through your favourite independent book store, and on-line from McNally-Robinson, Chapters-Indigo, Amazon.ca and Amazon.com.

What the book is  about:


Ever since humans stood up and walked they have left tracks across the landscape. From the footprints that a trio of pre-humans left in soft volcanic ash 3.6 million years ago in East Africa to a newly completed inter-oceanic highway in South America, we change things wherever we travel. These marks--be they dirt packed down by thousands of passing feet, or roads engineered to carry messengers, armies, goods and people-- frequently outlast the societies that built them. Even though we linger only a flicker of time in the long history of this planet, the effects of our travel long outlive us.

We are engineered to think in short stretches of time, however, so the long run almost always escapes us. How to reconcile our own sprints through time with the marathon we ought to consider? That is the double subject of Road through Time.

To explore this, a map of where such an adventure might take us is necessary:

In Bottleneck on the Road from Eden, this book will take a look at the way our ancestors traveled on foot for unbelievably long distances. Beginning with the tricky crossing from Africa to the Eurasian continent, we'll discover how humans were fruitful and multiplied, peopling the rests of the earth in perhaps 10 or 12 thousand years.

Humans' impact on the landscape was minimal for eons, until they mastered fire, tamed beasts of burden, began to grow crops and faced the forest that bordered the plains where they had prospered. Into the Trees tells this story.

Then as population centres grew and trade increased, the paths people took wore more deeply into the land. Because trade goods had to be transported by animals or humans, only the very precious were worth the effort. The Things They Carried tells the story of these trade routes, beginning with the Obsidian Roads and the Lapis Lazuli road in Asia.

With increasing population and excess production, more complicated social organization meant greater intergroup conflict. Warriors' Roads explores the routes built by emperors from Persia to the Andes, vestiges of which we can see today, and along whose tracks many of us still travel.

Although this is a book about roads, travel by water must not be ignored. It goes back as a far as those first steps out of Africa, but it came into its own as trade demand increased. Without help from machines, it is much easier to move goods and people on water than it is over land. Across the Water tells how sea and river trade routes developed, and how canals were built where rivers didn't run, until the great population crescendo that saw millions of people take to ships to exploit and settle new found lands.

This "New World" wasn't uninhabited, despite what explorers from Europe thought. Mystery Roads follows the paths taken by adventurers out of Asia into the Western Hemisphere. This is a story that new scientific techniques are rewriting.

The Revenge of the Road chronicles the massive road building of the 19th and 20th century, including the growth of cities, and dependence on first railroad and then internal combustion vehicles.

In Speeding we collide with the disaster wrought by our roads and the vehicles that run on them. Our sprawling cities designed--or redesigned-- for the automobile are a big part of the problem. Two ways to deal with that are explored in visits to Curítiba and Brasília in Brazil.

The book ends with On the Road II, a second trip by bus, this one across the Andes from Cusco, Peru, to Rio Branco, Brazil on the new Interoceanic Highway. From footpaths to roads opening wilderness, the trip gives a front row seat on massive changes taking place throughout the world. In the distance we'll see the end of our collective travel on this fragile planet--or, conversely, a future that will allow us to continue moving onward.

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